Error budgets are an essential tool for balancing innovation and reliability in high-availability systems by setting realistic service level objectives (SLOs). They help teams focus on critical issues, improve system reliability, reduce downtime, and enhance user experience. Calculating and managing error budgets involves defining clear SLOs, determining acceptable error rates, and regularly updating to ensure relevance. Despite their benefits, error budgets can fail if not properly implemented, often due to unclear SLOs, lack of prioritization, or inadequate communication with stakeholders. Effective error budget management requires prioritization of improvements, balanced innovation, stakeholder communication, and integration with other metrics. By embracing best practices, teams can build reliable and resilient systems, meeting customer and stakeholder needs while using solutions like Harness Security Reliability Management to automate processes in CI/CD pipelines.